2016 STR Edward Gordon Craig Lecture by Lola Arias
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Memory is a minefield. The art of re-enactment
Can art be a way to revive the past? A means to represent memories and make present what is lost somewhere in our heads? Lola Arias has been working for more than ten years on interdisciplinary projects, using theatre, film and visual arts to explore the relationship between experience and narration, memory and fiction, personal history and a country’s history. In this lecture she will provide an overview of her most recent productions in order to examine how writing can be produced that departs from real histories, what the relationship between the self-narrator and the artist is created through this kind of theatre, and, above all, what collateral effects these projects have on life and viceversa.
Lola Arias (Buenos Aires, 1976)
Lola Arias is a writer, theatre director, and performer. She collaborates with artists from different disciplines in theatre, literature, music and art projects. Her productions play with the overlap zones between reality and fiction.
She works with actors, policemen, beggars, musicians, dancers, prostitutes, children and animals. She staged Mi vida después (2009) with six performers who reconstruct their parents’ youth in 1970’s Argentina by means of photos, letters, cassettes and old clothes. And also Familienbande (2009) about a family with two mothers at Kammerspiele, Munich, and That Enemy Within (2010) in collaboration with two identical twins at HAU, Berlin. In Chile, she staged The year I was born (2012), based on biographies of people born during Pinochet’s dictatorship. In Buenos Aires, she produced Melancolía y Manifestaciones (2012) a play about her mother’s depression. Her piece The art of making money (2013) was performed by beggars, prostitutes and street musicians from the city of Bremen. And The art of arriving ( 2015) uses the example of Bulgarian kids living in Germany to develop a scenic tutorial which reflects upon how to start a new life in another country. Her last project Minefield (2016) brings together British and Argentinian veterans of the Falkland / Malvinas war to share their first-hand experience of the conflict and life since.
Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music, and released the albums El amor es un francotirador (2007) and Los que no duermen (2011).Her projects with Stefan Kaegi are Chácara Paraíso (2007), Airport Kids (2008) and Ciudades Paralelas (2010), a Festival of urban interventions in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Zurich and other cities.
She published poetry, fiction and plays. Lola Arias’ works for theatre have been performed at festivals including Festival d’Avignon; Theater Spektakel, Zurich; Wiener Festwochen; Spielart Festival, Munich; Alkantara Festival, Lisbon; Under the radar, NY. And in venues like: Theatre de la Ville, Red Cat LA, Walker Art Centre, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.